Paradigm recently announced a $20 million investment in crypto infrastructure company Ithaca. Ithaca is a startup focused on expanding research and development and building commercial products for open source tools such as Reth and Foundry.
Built by Paradigm CTO and General Partner Georgios Konstantopoulos and less than 20 engineers who have helped build projects like Reth, Ithaca contributes to open source projects, starting with the release of Layer 2, Odyssey. Accelerate the development of cryptocurrencies by maintaining and maintaining Built on Reth for performance and stability (according to the OP Stack standard).
Konstantopoulos, CTO of Paradigm and now CEO of Ithaca, issued the following statement to X about the project:
Cryptocurrencies need to move faster.
I started @Ithacxyz Accelerate Frontier and raise $20 million from @paradigm.
We've been working with the developer community on some of crypto's toughest problems. Small team = big impact. The future of cryptocurrencies will be built together. pic.twitter.com/tdZI543oVh
— Georgios Konstantopoulos (@gakonst) October 11, 2024
Ithaca helps advance the cryptocurrency industry while allowing great developers to continue working on important open source public goods within cryptocurrencies. The Ithaca team is comprised of key contributors and maintainers of the open source projects listed above.
Georgios will continue in his role as Paradigm's CTO and general partner and lead the Ithaca team as CEO. And Matt Huang will join as chairman.
Previously, Mr. Huang was a partner at Sequoia Capital, where he focused on early-stage venture investments, including leading the firm's crypto efforts. And Huang was the founder and CEO of Hotspots, a Y Combinator company acquired by Twitter in 2012, and an angel investor in companies like Bytedance and Instacart. He bought his first Bitcoin from MtGox in 2012. Matt holds a BS in Mathematics from MIT.
Konstantopoulos was previously an independent consultant and researcher specializing in cryptography, information security, and mechanism design. He received his master's degree. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
Paradigm will continue to fund and support open source projects, and the Ithaca team will continue to contribute to and maintain open source projects.
